Book Details

About This Book

Create the perfect monitoring configuration based on your specific needs

Extract reports and visualizations from your data

Integrate monitoring data with other systems in your environment

Learn the advanced techniques of Zabbix to monitor networks and performances in large environments

Who This Book Is For

If you are a system administrator or an IT architect and want to know how to better integrate your Zabbix installation with your surrounding environment, this book is ideal for you. A basic, working knowledge of Zabbix is assumed, so that the book can focus on how to take full advantage of every component. The code in the later chapter will be explained in its functionality, but basic programming skills are assumed as well.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Deploying Zabbix

Defining the environment size

Zabbix architectures

Summary

Chapter 2: Distributed Monitoring

Zabbix proxies

Zabbix nodes

Proxies versus nodes

Security considerations

Summary

Chapter 3: High Availability and Failover

Understanding high availability

Understanding the levels of IT service

Some consideration about high availability

Implementing high availability on a web server

Configuring the Zabbix Server for high availability

Database high availability

Summary

Chapter 4: Collecting Data

Gathering items as raw data

Understanding the data flow for Zabbix items

Database monitoring with Zabbix

Zabbix JMX monitoring

Zabbix SNMP monitoring

Web pages monitoring

Aggregated and calculated items

Summary

Chapter 5: Visualizing Data

Graphs

Visualizing the data through maps

Visualizing through screens

Visualizing the data through a slide show

Controlling centre slides and the big display challenge

IT services

Summary

Chapter 6: Managing Alerts

Understanding trigger expressions

Managing the trigger dependencies

Taking action

Summary

Chapter 7: Managing Templates

Creating templates

Adding entities to a template

Linking templates to hosts

Discovering hosts

Low-level discovery

Summary

Chapter 8: Handling External Scripts

External checks

The UserParameter

Sending data using zabbix_sender

Working with Zabbix protocols

Communicating with Zabbix

Summary

Chapter 9: Extending Zabbix

Exploring the Zabbix API

Synchronizing templates across different nodes

Mass operations

Exporting data

Summary

Chapter 10: Integrating Zabbix

An overview of Request Tracker

Setting up RT to better integrate with Zabbix

Setting up Zabbix to integrate with Request Tracker

Creating RT tickets from the Zabbix events

Summary

What You Will Learn

Integrate Zabbix in your large or complex environment

Establish a distributed monitoring solution

Set up Zabbix and its database in a High Availability configuration

Collect data from a variety of monitoring objects

Organize your data into graphs, charts, and maps

Build intelligent triggers and alarms to monitor you network

Write scripts to create custom monitoring probes

Understand Zabbix's database scheme and harvest data from it

Automate procedures using Zabbix's API

In Detail

Monitoring systems are a crucial part of any IT environment. They can be extremely useful not only to identify specific problems, but also to measure your system’s performance and find the best way to improve it. However, they can be misleading and confusing if not correctly configured and managed. False alarms and missing data can undermine a monitoring system's contribution to a healthy IT department. Zabbix 2.2 allows you to customize and implement ideas by extending, adding, or customizing functionality, giving an added value to that technology.

This comprehensive guide will help you to make both strategic and practical decisions about the Zabbix monitoring system, so that it will fit your environment and monitoring needs like a glove. From choosing the correct size and configurationto what you should actually monitor, including exporting and integrating your data with other systems, this book will leave you with no doubts about the crucial role of a well configured monitoring system.

Introducing you to methods to configure and choose between high availability and distributed Zabbix architectures for your largeenvironment, this guide will proceed to show you how to gather monitoring data, visualize, and act on it. Next, the guide explores how you can extend Zabbix and connect it to trouble ticketing systems or data mining solutions. You will also learn how to choose the ideal database backend, monitor appliances that only talk SNMP and application servers that talk JMX, and organize your charts and maps in screens that can be visualized on big screens. It shows you how to leverage Zabbix's discovery capabilities to track your ever changing environment and build complex, intelligent alarms that won't distract you with trivial problems. Finally, you will learn to expand Zabbix's capabilities through its scripting facilities, protocol and powerful API.

Authors

Andrea Dalle Vacche

Andrea Dalle Vacche is a highly skilled IT professional with over 14 years of experience in the IT industry and banking. He graduated from Università degli Studi di Ferrara with an information technology certification. This laid the technology foundation that Andrea has built on ever since. Andrea has acquired various industry-respected accreditations, which include Cisco, Oracle, RHCE, ITIL, and of course, Zabbix. Throughout his career, he has worked in many large-scale environments, often in roles that have been very complex, on a consultant basis. This has further enhanced his growing skillset, added to his practical knowledge base and increased his appetite for theoretical technical studying.

He has published a number of articles on Zabbix-related software, including DBforBIX all in one database monitoring solution and Orabbix to monitor Oracle. His projects are publicly available on http://www.smartmarmot.com. Currently, Andrea is working as a senior architect for a leading global investment bank in a very diverse and challenging environment. He deals with many aspects of the Unix/Linux platforms as well as many types of third-party software, which are strategically aligned to the bank's technical roadmap. In addition to this title, Andrea Dalle Vacche is also the author of Mastering Zabbix and Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials.

Stefano Kewan Lee

Stefano Kewan Lee is an IT consultant with more than 12 years of experience in system integration, security, and administration. He is a certified Zabbix specialist in large environments holds a Linux administration certification from the LPI and a GIAC GCFW certification from SANS Institute. When he's not busy breaking websites, he lives in the countryside with his two cats and two dogs and practices martial arts. In addition to this title, Stefano Kewan Lee is a coauthor of Mastering Zabbix, Packt Publishing.

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Learning

As a new user, these step-by-step tutorial guides will give you all the practical skills necessary to become competent and efficient.

Beginner's Guide

Friendly, informal tutorials that provide a practical introduction using examples, activities, and challenges.

Essentials

Fast paced, concentrated introductions showing the quickest way to put the tool to work in the real world.

Cookbook

A collection of practical self-contained recipes that all users of the technology will find useful for building more powerful and reliable systems.

Blueprints

Guides you through the most common types of project you'll encounter, giving you end-to-end guidance on how to build your specific solution quickly and reliably.

Mastering

Take your skills to the next level with advanced tutorials that will give you confidence to master the tool's most powerful features.

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Progressing

Building on core skills you already have, these titles share solutions and expertise so you become a highly productive power user.